The Still Small Voice

Work was absolutely insane today. I am an ER nurse at a large hospital in Kansas and today was insanity. The moment I walked in for my shift I already had four people calling my name for help. There was a young girl having repetitive seizures, a confused man who had pulled out his third IV of the day and a patient who was having chest pain and needed to be seen immediately. And that was just in the first hour! I started running and honestly didn’t stop for goodness knows how long, but finally I got a few minutes to sneak away and eat some food. Then my phone rang and they needed me to run to the blood bank and grab some blood for a two year old cancer patient. I grumbled but quickly made my way upstairs and then back to the room of this little girl. I knew I had to stay in the room for the first 15 minutes of the transfusion so I decided to hop on the computer and catch up on some charting and check on the labs of a few other patients. As I am sitting there typing away, I feel a tiny poke on my leg. I turn around and this small adorable girl is grinning at me and reaching for my hand. I reach out to grasp her tiny fingers and in that moment everything else faded away. There were probably a hundred other things I could have been doing in that moment, but all I wanted to do was sit and be present with this sick little girl. Eventually my 15 minutes passed, and I had to go back to work, but that encounter followed me home.

As I sat and thought about that girl, I wondered why her small gesture struck me so much. Holding her hand wasn’t the “coolest” thing I had done all day and probably not the most “important” either. Sitting in my bed (I was tired okay!) I looked up to the crucifix on my wall and realized that I had seen Jesus in the eyes of that child. In the busyness of my day He called out to me to stop and see Him. If you are anything like me, you probably frequently get caught up in the “doing” of life. Some days I am so obsessed with productivity I forget that my worth does not come from the things I accomplish. Jesus does not ask us to come to him with all our wins and prizes. He simply asks us to be who he created us to be and all the rest will fall into place. We don’t have to earn Christ’s love and honestly if that’s what we are trying to do we will probably lose sight of Him. God is not in the storm or the fire or the loud noises where we may try to find Him. He is in the still small voice that calls out to us. In the eyes of a child who needed me to stop for a second and realize she needed someone to hold her hand.

So, my challenge to anyone reading this is to stop the going and the doing and the accomplishing for just a moment to see Christ. It can be in the sunrise when you get up in the morning or the friend who gave you a hug right when you needed it. Maybe its in the cup of coffee or the song that struck you so deeply. Whatever it is, Christ is present in that moment and He is calling out to you to remember his love and His goodness. Without remembering Christ, what is the good of all the hard work we put in? “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal” (1 Corinthians 13). Don’t be a noisy cymbal. Remember to who you belong and why you walk this earth. You are so loved and seen by the creator. Every day strive to hear the still, small voice who will never let you forget it.

- Alex Kerschen